Dark Maze

followed signs at the gate of the main entrance to Bellevue and found the psychiatric ward, where I remember Picasso telling me he had been an outpatient for quite a long while. There was a herd of patients in wheelchairs sitting at one end of the lobby in an area marked off by purple tape on the floor. They were full of Thorazine and there were straps across their laps to keep them from pitching out of their chairs.
    I showed my gold shield to the duty nurse and said I wanted to speak to somebody who could help me with the medical file on Charlie Furman. And while she punched this name into a buzzing desk computer, I asked her for good measure if she had ever heard of a patient called Picasso.
    “Oh, sure, the painter gentleman,” she said. “He used to come by pretty regular, a real cutey. But I don’t know, we ain’t seen him in I-don’t-know-when.”
    This would be the first time I heard a nurse say “ain’t.” She stared at her computer screen, chewed gum and hiked up her undergarments. “I got nothing here showing on no Furman, Charlie. Or Charles, neither.”
    “Well,” I asked her, “when Picasso used to come by, did he have any regular doctor?”
    “Sure,” she said, giving her eyes a roll. “That’d be Dr. Reiser. Ronald Reiser. He’s up in the Zoo—and if you ask me, it’s rubbed off on him. Um, you know the Zoo?”
    I knew, I said. Though I had not been to the top floor of the Bellevue psych ward in a lot of years, I could not imagine that much had changed. A sprawling open floor, full of heavily sedated patients lying on their backs in beds secured to the floor with electromagnetic locks, nylon restraining belts around their stomachs, wrists and ankles secured to bedposts with leather lashes. There were no windows anywhere. Several doctors in long white coats streamed from bed to bed, murmuring their sweet nothings: “We’re all here to help you... this is all for your own good...”
    I spoke to the head nurse, who in turn showed me to a huge-jawed security guard posted outside a hallway door with a sign that read to roof. I was told that Dr. Reiser could be found tending his garden. And so I took the stairs, walked out along the graveled rooftop and spotted a collection of wooden planting tubs, at the center of which was a short man in a polo shirt with a frizz of black hair blowing up over a round sunburned head.
    “Dr. Ronald Reiser?”
    He turned and said, suspiciously, “Who wants to know?"
    I showed him my shield. “I need to talk to you about a patient of yours who calls himself Picasso. His real name is Furman, Charlie Furman.”
    “So that’s his name, hey?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “Do you like tomatoes, Officer?”
    “Actually, it’s Detective Hockaday, Hock, if you want.“
    “Sure, Detective. You like tomatoes?”
    “Actually, yes. I’m a big chili maker.”
    “Oh, that’s good. You’d be surprised how hard it is for me to give away good tomatoes like I grow up here on top of this nut house. Come back around the middle of August, you’ll see my beauties.”
    “I’ll do that, maybe. About Furman... Picasso...“
    “Oh, yeah. How’s the patient?”
    “That’s what I want you to tell me.”
    Reiser muttered something and went back to digging around with a trowel in the new soil of his planting tubs. “Four, five years I have been seeing this guy, which I am not supposed to be doing since he won’t come clean with a name or anything. I am wasting the taxpayers’ money four, five years—and everybody else around here the same before me. Nobody gets nothing out of this guy but his observations on this and that, this and that. Nothing that adds up to anything whole, though.”
    “Do you know where he lives?”
    “He’s in police trouble?”
    “Do you have an address?”
    “I don’t know where the guy lives, no.“
    “Did you know his wife, Celia?”
    “Not by name. I figured he was married once. He used to talk about his rotten crooked wife who was a gambler. Hey! Did he give his wife the business?”
    “I just want him for questioning.”
    Reiser slapped his crimson forehead. “So this is very serious? Why else would a cop be standing out on a roof with a shrink?”
    “It’s serious, yes.”
    “Let’s go down to my office, what do you say?”
    “You’re the doctor.”
    “I am, I am.”
    I followed Reiser down the staircase back out into the Zoo hallway where the guard with the jaw was still loyally on duty. Reiser greeted him with a